This Mask of Death
by Igenlode Wordsmith
Summary: Moonlight over Perros-Guirec, and something is stirring in the graveyard... Leroux Gothic, written for the Writers Anonymous Halloween Challenge.


**This Mask of Death**

* * *

 _"...je ne sais point jusqu'où s'en fut mon imagination, ni où elle s'arrêta..."_

* * *

It was a cloudless night, with the moon riding cold and distant above, and the world was in the grip of a hard frost. Snow had fallen to veil the barren ground, and the ancient granite slabs that kept their sentry-watch across the moor — like so many cairns piled by the hands of giants — wore wind-blown drifts of white between their stacked stones, as if korrigans dwelt within and had stopped up the draughts with handfuls of snow in lieu of heather. But the biting breeze that had sprung up at sunset had long since ebbed to silence, and the high heath lay frozen and unmoving beneath the moon. Only the waves tossed endlessly in the bay far below, hissing with age-old hunger against their pallid fringes of sand.

And in the graveyard at Perros-Guirec, where the hill ran down to the sea, a shadow moved amongst the dead.

Piled high in the moonlight they were, with weathered jaws and empty eyes yawning up to greet the greater orb above; skulls by the hundred stacked like flints in a wall, the dead of ages reclaimed from the shallow soil and dismembered into neatly placed bone. Limbs piled like sticks were interlocked amid heads and ribs, jostling side by side as if the wall of the church itself were founded on those who had once worshipped there, and framing a dark door in grisly welcome.

To the stolid peasants of Brittany, the sight was too familiar to raise so much as a shudder. The shadow that stirred there now was no villager of that place, living or dead. But it, too, showed no sign of fear among that grinning company.

~o~

Down by the quayside the scattered cottages of Perros-Guirec clustered more closely along the street, and a single light flickered upstairs in the low white inn that lay there, at the sign of the Setting Sun. The shutters stood open, and a watcher in the snowy street, glancing upward, might have glimpsed from time to time in that lamplit glow the face and figure of a young woman as she leaned her head upon her hand or drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders. She was fair-haired and very lovely; but her features were pale and strangely distant, as if veiled by something beyond this world.

In the room next to hers Raoul de Chagny tossed restless between the sheets, bone-weary yet too tired and heartsick to sleep. The night before had been spent in the train to Lannion, propped up jolting in the corner of his compartment in a feverish half-doze with her face always before him and her letter clutched between cramped fingers, to be re-read again and again in hope and trepidation. But the hours since sunrise had slipped away, and the precious day that he might have spent in Christine's company had ebbed like their promised reunion into misery, quarrels, and mysteries that he could not understand. He had dined poorly, declined lunch, and missed breakfast in his eagerness to see her again. But in the tumult of his thoughts hunger, like sleep, evaded him, and he could not at that moment have swallowed a mouthful.

From the distant church tower the clock struck the half-hour. It was almost midnight. Raoul groaned and turned over yet again, shivering beneath the thin covers. Then a sudden shock ran through him, and on the instant he was wide awake.

Christine was not in bed. He could hear her footsteps from next door: the light, almost furtive movements of someone preparing to leave a sleeping household at dead of night.

Scarcely knowing what he was doing, Raoul threw back the bedclothes and groped hurriedly for his own garments, dressing at breakneck speed. He shrugged into his jacket, thrust hasty feet into his boots, and sat motionless on the edge of his bed, listening.

There it was! The creak of her bedroom door, pushed cautiously open, and the whisper of her skirts as she slipped past. Without a thought he jumped to his feet, eased open his own door, and caught sight of a pale figure at the end of the corridor like a glimmering ghost.

She was making for the stairs. Raoul leaned over the bannister as she descended and caught a flicker of candle-light from below as if Madame Tricard had come out from the back kitchen. Clearly this expedition was expected; arranged, even. More secrets. More vague, threatening mysteries, with Christine Daaé at the heart of them and that hazy unseen danger always around her...

Hurried whispering from below. Raoul leaned out further but could make nothing of it, save the landlady's final warning admonition: "Don't lose the key." Before he could grasp the import of what he had just heard, the front door opened, and was almost immediately shut and locked once more. This time from the outside.

For an instant he knew something like panic. Christine was gone; gone, and he was trapped powerless inside sturdy stone walls.

The window of his room looked out over the waterfront. Rushing to the casement, he flung it wide open, heedless of noise. There she was, an elusive white shape amid the stark moonlit shadows in the street below. And there — there, as if by a miracle — was the tree that he had half-remembered, growing up by the side of the inn and stretching its branches almost, yes, he thought, almost within reach...

His long overcoat lay across the back of the chair where he had dropped it, and he reached for it automatically before coming to his senses with a rueful look. Instead he caught up scarf and gloves, and a moment later had launched himself without hesitation into the snowy branches of the tree outside his window.

Even without the encumbering overcoat it was not an easy climb. Raoul dropped the last two metres to the ground more by chance than by design, paused briefly to brush off the worst of the snow from his clothing — his gloves were already soaked through and his fingers were beginning to ache from the cold — and hurried in Christine's wake.

His footsteps crunched loudly in the frozen crust, and he expected her to turn at any moment and see him; once or twice he drew breath to call out to her, but the words seemed to stick in his throat. What could he possibly say? It had begun to dawn uncomfortably on him that there was no conceivable defence for his actions. He had no right to be here, no right to demand her secrets, no right to be trailing her furtively through the snow... If only she would turn and confront him, at least — honest anger would be easier to face than constant imagined accusations. Surely she must be able to hear him in this eerie quiet?

He had almost caught up with her now, but Christine gave no sign that she was even aware of his existence. She glided softly across the snow like a sleepwalker, and Raoul's unease chilled into sudden sharp concern. He reached out to catch her arm; but at that moment the chimes of the church clock fell heavily across the air, striking the three-quarters, and Christine hastened suddenly forward and began almost to run. Raoul stumbled, caught himself, and hurried in pursuit, half-angry and half-afraid.

The moonlight bleached the colour from everything and laid stark shadows across their path, but there was no doubt as to Christine's destination. She was making for the graveyard, of all places; for the graveyard at midnight.

The gate in the wall, when at last they reached it, stood in deep shadow, and Raoul expected to see her check her headlong course and to hear the clank of the latch. But there was no sound. Christine passed through without a moment's hesitation, as if she had known the unseen barrier lay open in welcome. Raoul, who had paid his own respects that day at her father's grave bare hours earlier, knew very well that it had been shut.

But the memory of her father's simple tombstone eased his mind somewhat; it was the anniversary of old Daaé's death, after all — was that not why they had come? — and Christine's faith was simple and profound. She had loved the old man very much. This strange night-time pilgrimage was doubtless some pious duty, no more. And the churchyard... the churchyard beneath the moon was not at all what he had expected.

By the grey light of day it had been a bleak and eerie place, with only the tumbled flowers across Daaé's grave to bring a breath of life to the frozen world of the dead, and only their single splash of colour amidst the bare granite and weathered bone. By night he had thought it would be a place of sinister shuddering; of gaping shadows and uncanny noises, where shapes of unknown terror stalked the dark. But the moon rode high above, and the snow lay tranquil and undisturbed, as if a shining silver radiance had flowed across the ground and filled all that place with weightless light. The church soared, magnificent, above a sea of unsullied peace, and brightness filled every corner. In all his imaginings, he had never dreamed it would be so beautiful.

It was bitterly cold, with a clarity that took his breath away. The only shadows were those of the low crosses that here and there marked a burial plot, and of himself and Christine. She had gone at once to her father's grave and knelt there with bowed head, and Raoul did not like to disturb her. He crossed himself and murmured a few words of his own as the strokes of midnight rang out slowly from the tower above, a long, solemn tolling that filled the waiting night and seemed to echo through every chasm of his soul.

But that last stroke had not yet died away when Christine's head came up in a sudden ecstasy of joy, her arms flung wide as if to embrace the very moon. Light streamed down across her transfigured face, and Raoul knew a moment's agony at the sight of the adoration there — for how could one be jealous of heaven itself?

He did not understand... and then in the next moment he too heard it, and felt his own senses overwhelmed. Disbelief and enchantment sent him reeling, and he caught at a railing close at hand, clinging to the icy bite of the iron as if for dear life. It could not— no, it could not be...

Music filled the churchyard as if the moonlight itself were made manifest, yearning in celestial beauty that spoke of sorrow beyond words. It came from nowhere to surround them, as if the Angel of Christine's fancies leaned down bodiless to press its blessings upon her brow. And yet... it was not the music of the spheres that he heard, nor the singing of a myriad distant stars. It was a voice he would have known among a thousand; the voice that had sung through his childhood in those shared days with Christine so long ago. It was the voice, ghostly yet unmistakable, of her father's violin.

Old Daaé had played "The Resurrection of Lazarus" for them many and many a time in moments of sadness. But never like this. Never with such unearthly art, so that the very graves seemed to gape and the souls be called forth... Raoul remembered, in the distant part of his mind that remained his own, that Daaé's violin had been buried with him, cradled in the coffin within its owner's arms. Arms that were years dead, with the fingers that pressed those mouldering strings no more than ragged bone. Like those grinning skulls that walled in the church, with their lolling, toothless jaws—

Vision had become nightmare. Raoul shivered and could not stop, imagination racked by bone-deep shudders of crawling cold.

A sharp, dry sound came from the bone-pile. It seemed the skulls were laughing at him.

The music had ceased.

~o~

Breathing hard, Raoul found himself standing isolated in the little churchyard, chilled to the bone in an icy sweat of alternate shame and fury. He had let his ideas run away with him like some superstitious peasant; this so-called Angel had played a trick on him, just as had been done on poor Christine with her tales of music in the walls. And if this violinist were no ghost, then he was here, hidden in advance to mock at Christine's heartfelt faith and Raoul's credulity...

Christine had risen to her feet and was moving slowly to the gate, hands folded again in her muff and her face withdrawn in prayer. She gave no sign that she had seen him, and Raoul made no attempt to detain her. It had come to him in a flash just where their mysterious nemesis must have concealed himself. He stood very still, with his eyes fixed on that bleached stack of bone in the moonlight.

As Christine's footsteps faded down the lane, something moved. A skull rolled loose directly towards him, its hollow sockets rimmed with ice. Then another, and another, as if some ghastly game of _boules_ were in progress and he the target. Raoul held his ground, conscious this time only of a leap of triumph: he had been right, and now his enemy was trapped.

A dark shape broke from cover and Raoul darted in pursuit, bursting through the vestry door and into the church in its wake. For a moment, plunging in out of the moonlight, he could see nothing. Then he caught a faint glimmer of the great stone arches overhead.

It was only a little country church, he told himself, struggling to keep his nerve. Not a cavernous vault of shadow with the red eye of the sanctuary lamp. Not a forest of pillars like silent watchers with dark-pooled wings... Something flickered in the corner of his eye, ink-black and spreading wide—

With a sob of breath Raoul flung himself not backward but forward, grappling for that bat-like spread, and felt coarse cloth slip through his hand. His quarry took flight before him, visible now in the dim light filtering from the windows as a shrouded figure in a hooded cloak. But his grasp of that all too earthly garment lent Raoul himself urgent wings, and together they crashed forward through the dusk — coatless pursuer and mantled shade — to the foot of the altar steps.

The church yawned away vast above him and the long windows were pale slits in the aisle behind. Moonlight streamed down, colourless and grey, through the rich patterned glass of the chancel windows, and lay upon the steps like the dusty ghost of incense long since fled. The cross reared stark in shadow above them both, and Raoul, sleepless and cold, felt his senses swim as if the Christ had frowned.

He dragged at the cloak he still clutched between numbed fingers, forcing that looming figure to turn. Here in this light he should see him at last and know his foe, unmasked as flesh and blood beneath that rough-woven wool, and no phantom fiddler from beyond the grave...

The figure swung round on him with a snarl, teeth bared beneath the hood, and the light drained across an inhuman face. A red flicker gleamed back from shadowed sockets, and the withered thing moved, distorted in rage and fear like a screaming mockery of a skull. The Devil stooped down on his helpless pursuer, and for a moment Raoul knew himself face to face with the oldest Enemy of all.

He tried to cross himself; failed, as his body betrayed him and weakened limbs sank to the ground. Darkness engulfed him, and his head fell back, motionless.

A few seconds later, though Raoul de Chagny did not know it, he was alone.

~o~

Dawn came late in the winter. Old Antoine shuffled and stamped the snow from his feet outside, grumbling as usual at the heavy latch. The great door came ajar at last, creaking a little under its own weight, and day's first light slid in through the crack as it widened. Pale rays spilled along the church. They fell upon the ashen face of a young man sprawled across the altar steps, unmoving and cold as death.

When events called for it, the old shepherd still had a fair turn of speed left in him. He was down the aisle in moments and on his knees beside the body, muttering under his breath. A sad do, this, reckon how... and the fine young gentleman from Paris, too! Happen he'd been here all night, with the frost stood hard upon the fells and the snow a-lying on the ground... a sad do, surely.

Gnarled fingers felt along the boy's slack jaw, probing for a trace of pulse, and Antoine grunted with relief. There: no more than the thready beat of a newborn lamb dropped too soon, but it was there. He sighed and shuffled stiffly to his feet, wrapping his own coat in all its sheep-scented warmth around waxen flesh.

Best get the young'un to the inn, where such fine folk belonged. There'd been queer doings afoot tonight, choose how. Queer doings, and queer things that walked abroad.

He heaved the boy up across his back, slung there as light as if he'd been a stringy old ewe, and began the long trudge down to the water's edge. Time to rouse Madeline Tricard and the household at the sign of the Setting Sun.

~o~

Someone was chafing his hands with warm flannel. Raoul tried to say something, but it came out as a groan. He felt someone bending over him, and opened his eyes with a vast effort. He'd been at the grave— no, he'd been in the church—

"No, Raoul, lie still!"

He let himself fall back against the pillows, blinking up at her in vast uncertain relief. "Christine..."

No reply; but her hand tightened for an instant around his.


End file.
